In a T-shirt sold in 2008 to raise money for victims of violence in Darfur, artist Nadia Plesner depicted an African child holding a Louis Vuitton-style bag. So Louis Vuitton sued her. When she recently included the same design in a painting, it sued her again.

The first time around, Louis Vuitton claimed it wanted merely to stop her from selling the merchandise. This time, however, there is little pretense that it is about anything other than wanting the image gotten rid of. Paul Schmelzer writes:

Despite a clearly artistic -- and not commercial -- intention behind the work, Louis Vuitton is seeking monetary penalties (220,000 Euros or roughly $307,000 and counting, with no ceiling on the penalty) and aims to prevent Plesner from exhibiting the painting either on her website or at venues in the European Union. (Here's an unofficial English translation of the court order.)

The "Serious Mario Movie Trailers" meme meets a second layer of recursion in this latest amusement. If you are a PC gamer worth your salt, you'll know why I think the creators of this should be in charge of a remake of Deus Ex. Read the rest

Here's something I've never been able to remember: when I rent a car I forget to notice which side the gas cap is on.

For the rest of my trip, I don't think to look. I only think about it when I'm driving and it's time to fill up the tank. I try to use the side view mirrors to see which side the gas cap is on. It never works. Then I look at other cars on the road, hoping to spot one that is the same model as mine so I can see which side the gas cap is on. Unfortunately, I'm car blind in the way that some people are face blind, so that usually doesn't work. I usually end up driving to the pump and finding out if I got lucky.

But last month I met Joshua Schacter (creator of Delicious) at TED and he told me that most late-model cars have a little arrow on the gas gauge that points to the side of the car with the gas cap. This information has changed my life.

Joshua's latest creation is ClueDB, a website "for sharing tips and tricks on how to make life better. You can tag, vote and comment on the clues you like. And you can contribute clues as well." Sample clue: "Putting a screw into a threaded hole -- Turn the screw backwards until it clicks into the first thread. the chances of putting it in wrong are much less that way." Read the rest

Photo (pixelated by us): "In the process of suppressing the photographs, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In this image, the bodies of two Afghan men have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road."

[Video Link] Divvy doesn't do anything except let you resize OS X and Windows windows by snapping them to widely-spaced gridpoints. I watched the above video, and was interested enough to download the demo (which doesn't expire but has nags about 2 or 3 times a day). I ended up liking it so much I bought it for $14.

I use it dozens of times a day. For example, I use it to set up a couple of Finder windows and a FileMaker window (so I can compare MAKE stories that are on my hard drive, on MAKE's file server, and in the editorial database.) I use it to quickly pop open and resize side-by-side Chrome browsers so I can write a blog entry. I find more uses for it almost every day.

Divvy offers configurable keyboard shortcuts - I use "1" to fill the left half of the screen and "2" to fill the right half.

This is something OS X and Windows should have baked into their operating systems.

Paul Baran, whose co-invention of packet switching lies at the very foundation of the Internet, has died. He was 84. Baran spent the 1960s at RAND's computer science department where he focused on developing a system for "distributed communications," fundamental research that was seminal to the birth of Arpanet which, of course, became the Internet. In 1968, Baran left RAND to co-found the Institute for the Future, the not-for-profit forecasting group where I'm a research director. His impact was broad, deep, and truly transformational. From the NYT:

“The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral,” Baran said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’

“Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

"It's a 80's style video cabinet with a first-person-shooter game he created, where you run around a museum shooting Jeff Koons' work," says Syd. "It's pretty fucking awesome. Koons comes out to stop you, Big Boss style. I love that you end up fighting an endless wave of lawyers."

The game is set in a large museum during a Jeff Koons retrospective. The viewer is given a rocket launcher and the choice to destroy any of the work displayed in the gallery. If nothing is destroyed the player is allowed to look around for a couple of minutes and then the game ends. However, if one or more pieces are destroyed, an animated model of Jeff Koons walks out and chastises the viewer for annihilating his art. He then sends guards to kill the player. If the player survives this round then he or she is afforded the ability to enter a room where waves of curators, lawyers, assistants, and guards spawn until the player is dead. In the end, the game is unwinnable, and acts as a comment on the fine art studio system, museum culture, art and commerce, hierarchical power structures, and the destructive tendencies of gallery goers, to name a few.

I've had this pocket geiger counter for a while, and I have not used it much. I took it out recently to check its battery just in case. The unit is made to check for radioactivity in industrial or geological uses, like testing scrap metal from unknown sources, old Uranium glazes on pottery, or possibly contaminated waste sites. The device clicks satisfyingly clearly when it detects three types of radiation. It's bigger than a pocket, but much smaller than the old fashioned vacuum tube variety. It runs off an 9-volt battery.

This device is not sensitive enough to detect natural background radiation, or radiation drift in the atmosphere, or mild exposure on clothing, say. The device has to be very close to the radioactive source. It would have had trouble detecting the radiation during the accident at Chernobyl 500 meters outside of the plant itself. To measure the radiation in uranium ore, for instance, the device has to be just about touching the rock. Stuff has to be significantly "hot" to register, but this is the stuff worth worrying about. Read the rest